


Flickers in the Dark

by Denebola



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Action/Adventure, Gen, Horror, Mystery, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-02
Updated: 2014-11-02
Packaged: 2018-02-23 20:59:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2555471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Denebola/pseuds/Denebola
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a precipice in Eastern Europe which cartographers omit from their work, clergymen refuse to fly over when traveling, and on some dark, clear nights, unfamiliar stars can be glimpsed pulsing malignantly above its treacherous peaks. Wundagore Mountain is like no place that Coulson and his team have ever encountered, and if it has its way, nothing they can hope to survive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flickers in the Dark

**Author's Note:**

> Wanted to have this out before Halloween but didn't make the deadline. This story would conceivably take place after the end of season one but before Simmons leaves the team for Secret Hydra Summercamp.

November 16, 1975  
East Transia  
2:24 am

The amorphous dark mass swooped again as she stumbled frantically down the uneven crags, breath ragged and vision waning. An impossible shadow blotted out the moonlight and something like wing beats thundered from above in a curiously sweltering sky. She couldn't say whether it was the blood loss or a malignant force exuding from the heavy, reverberating claps that had her so disoriented. 

Her foot slipped into a crevice in the rock face, she realized only as the snap of bone registered dully to her ears. She refused to allow the break to slow her, positive that nothing would dissuade her pursuer, though the mortal terror coursing through her body alleviated most of the pain anyhow. By all counts, the creature should have set upon her by now. Any moment she would feel the crushing pressure of its jaws or some other nightmarish brutality, like the others. Her mind fled from those final, gruesome memories of her charges and colleagues as rapidly as her legs struggled to carry her away from the beast born of this _malocchio_ -afflicted wellspring of tormented dreams come to life.

As expected, wet gnashing followed by a ferocious snap exploded in the air directly overhead. Sluggishness of thought prevented her from realizing that a sudden misstep had saved her life but she was now free-falling down the mountainside. The jagged slopes rushed to meet her and silent blackness intermittent with warped, otherwordly roaring accompanied her tumble down the decline.

There was no way of knowing how long she rolled or the time frame of her unconsciousness, only that she awoke sheltered beneath a rocky outcropping. She dazedly watched the distant map of stars vacillate and contort in the heavens as if the world she occupied was atrophying into a veiled, abhorrent night. Her training directed her focus onto her surroundings despite her broken, aching body. The strange mottled green moss cushioning her prone form matched that from inside the hidden structure carved into the mountain. Dawn seemed nowhere near and she was still lost somewhere in the range, far from civilization or any friendlies. With an agonized scramble, she reached for the radio at her waist. By some trickery of chance, she found it still clipped tightly to her belt.

“This is Agent Montesi to base control declaring Protocol Black under S.H.I.E.L.D. designation code 084, I repeat, Protocol Black via 084,” she rasped. “Rescue operation has been compromised; single transport extraction... requested but likely not required. Ground forecast of AOI is unequivocally bleak.” Her mangled hand slowly fell to the ground with the radio still clutched in its bloody grip.

Then it rose again, quickly, to her lips. “And bring many explosives. Explosives and priests, if God can hear them from here.”

Her duty fulfilled to the limit of her ability, she laid back against the rapidly spreading, gently undulating moss and resignedly allowed the looming darkness to close in. The remote, fog-obscured lights of the tiny village far below blurred and faded. Willing away the final comforting thoughts of loved ones and home to prevent them in any form from being envisaged within this unholy expanse, Victoria Montessi surrendered to the malevolent peaks of Wundagore Mountain.

-

Today  
Classified Location  
11:16 am

 _“Oh, it's no problem._ I'd take inventory while it was on fire if it meant you'd all quit looking at me like that.”

The lights were down in the Non-Essential storage section of the Playground sub-sub-subterranean level and odd shadows played against the walls as a man cast a flashlight beam haphazardly across crates, tubs and cases stacked in neat, towering rows on chrome metal shelves on either side of him. He paced down the aisle, waving away dusty air that stirred with each footstep. 

“Forget inventory, I'd be just as useful to... International Security with a broom and dustpan,” he muttered sourly, before catching a sneeze in his sweater at the crook his elbow.

It was two weeks into Agent Leopold Fitz's return to duty, and he was not bouncing back the way he, or anyone it seemed, had hoped that he would. His frustration compounded what was already a demoralizing predicament and he could feel the tension whenever he walked into a room, the discomfited pity, the searing humiliation of those damned secret looks exchanged behind his back. The objective, nearly instinctive part of him that used to step back from a problem and form an ingenious solution was still aware, still searching for answers, but it was trapped in the mirrored funhouse of his mind and struck mute by the sight of the distorted reflection of the man he'd once been.

He was still himself - he knew that his intellect wasn't compromised - but that fact held all the relevance of a tree falling in the woods with no one around to hear it.

Simmons seeing him like this was the worst of it. Some days her hesitant, guarded smile triggered a lightheaded surge of regret and self-loathing. Her survival was supposed to be the happy ending to his story. Not this senseless, meandering epilogue that invalidated the triumphant narrative of all that came before. This wasn't the choice he'd made down in that primordial source of all life. He'd rather be a monkey.

Particles clouded the ray from his flashlight in every direction and began to tickle his nose the deeper he made his way through the passage between the piles of forgotten things in the bowels of S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ. “Geez, it's like nobody's been down here since the tri- augh - j-jur-... since the, the dawn of time.”

He spared a furtive twitch of his eyes to the ceiling, and a stray thought to the brute lurking above in his cage. Perhaps that man ought to be stuffed into a box down here with the other non-essential rubbish of the world.

Fitz was nearing the far wall, according to the ever-widening spot of light ahead of him. Cobwebs decorated most available areas, draped as wispy mesh between shelves and the corners and ceiling of the room. There was a phrase flitting in the periphery of his mind that suited his trespass into this godforsaken spider-web like labyrinth, but he couldn't snare and tame it into coherency. Something... about a parlor?

When he reached the wall, he flipped around and sagged, leaning his back against it. The flashlight illuminated his right shoe. Stretching before him was a gloomy, stagnant tapestry illustrating what lay in store for obsolete S.H.I.E.L.D resources entangled in its coalition and employed until their functionality expired.

“This is probably not a good place for me to be right now,” he admitted to himself.

A noise above his head to the left alerted him that something was moving inside the room with him. A subtle sliding, scratching sound was coming from the closest metal shelf. He pointed the flashlight at it and backed slowly down the middle aisle from where he came. Fitz couldn't make out anything but the glossy cardboard fileboxes on the top shelf wrapped in lightly fluttering cobwebs. Jerking the flashlight across the entire right side of the room failed to reveal anything amiss either.

He shined it to the left just for symmetry's sake. No movement.

When his beam returned to the previously empty space to his right, something flew at his face, rushed silently past him and circled back around to land at his feet. His scream blew the dust off an entire stack of plastic tubs.

Resting delicately on his sneakers was a sheet of paper.

It was thick and crinkled and when Fitz reached down to touch it, his fingers met a soft, almost velvety material. Some synapse fired in his brain and caused him to recall stories about pirate treasure maps from his childhood. Once safely retrieved from the floor, he examined it in the bright light beam. The yellowed, age-worn paper was curled at the ends as though it had been rolled up at one point but the dark scrawling covering its front and back, while incomprehensible, was plainly legible. Its penmanship bore similarity to something found on the walls of an insane asylum, but overall the document was remarkably well-preserved for being stored unprotected in the cellar for who knew how long.

“Agent Fitz! Agent Fitz?! Are you all right?!” called Agent Koenig from the entrance on other side of the room. “We heard a shriek!”

“My masculinity is grateful,” Fitz murmured, and carried on down the path to the door. “I'm fine! It was uh, a loud... sneeze. I found something that wasn't filed! A, um, document... thing.” 

“Great work! And if you're done down here, Director Coulson said that there are some devices the techs could use some help reverse-engineering in the lab.”

 _Right_. Fitz clutched the scroll tightly in his hand as he exited the area and allowed Koenig to usher him back up the stairs like a wayward kindergartner.

Far away in another dark, forgotten place, a crimson spark flickered to life and flared into a wide circle adorned with arcane symbols matching those on the uncovered parchment. An echo trembled through the earth, but not a single mortal in their most demented dreams would recognize the dreadful portent as laughter.

**Author's Note:**

> My first multi-chapter fic in long time, but I'm working steadily along on the next few chapters. Feel free to let me know what you think in the comments, and thanks for reading!


End file.
